Amazon made a bunch of new product announcements in the recently concluded re:Invent conference. I was looking forward to seeing what new products and features they were going to introduce in their serverless services and there are quite a few announcements. In this article, I have tried to summarize some of the announcements which I thought were the most interesting.

Provisioned Concurrency for Lambda

Amazon introduced Provision Concurrency for Lambda functions. This feature allows you to keep your Lambda functions initialized and ready to respond to any requests in milliseconds. This new feature should help with the Cold Start problem in Lambda.

The pricing for Provisioned Concurrency is slightly different. More information on pricing is available here.

Amazon EKS on AWS Fargate

Amazon now lets you run Kubernetes pods on AWS Fargate if you are using Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This would remove the need to provision any EC2 instances for running the pods. The main benefit of Fargate is that you only pay for the resources you use and you don’t need to worry about managing any infrastructure.

More details about how to use Fargate with EKS is available here.

AWS Fargate Spot Now Generally Available

Amazon is pushing a lot of Fargate improvements. With this new announcement, you can now run your Fargate jobs much cheaper by leveraging Amazon’s Spot instance capacity. These jobs can, however, be interrupted if Amazon needs the capacity back. Good use-cases for Fargate spot are any parallelizable and non-critical tasks that can be resumed or restarted if they get interrupted. More details available here.

Amazon RDS Proxy (preview)

Amazon is introducing a new database proxy service called RDS proxy. This proxy can help reduce the number of database connections especially for serverless applications (Lambda / Fargate) and thus use the database resources more efficiently.

RDS proxy is currently in preview and more information can be found here.

If there are any announcements or features in particular that excite you, please do comment below!